Happy Mother's Day Sakura
by thesaiyanjedi
Summary: It's Mother's Day and Sakura wakes up to a surprise from her family. While she waits, she reads a story about her mother-in-law, Kushina, and it gets her thinking about how much the two of them have in common and how lucky her life really is. NaruSaku. Prequel to "Shinachiku's First Adventure."
Hey everybody, thesaiyanjedi here with another one shot.

This is just a quick one I hammered out in honor of Mother's Day, and it is definitely the shortest thing I've published in a while. There's not really a story here, just a sort of day-in-the-life premise. Still, there is some warmth and emotion I went for in here and I hope you guys get some enjoyment out of it.

With that said, lets get to ready! Oh, and Happy Mother's Day!

* * *

The sun peaked through the curtains. Sunday morning had come. Sakura Haruno Uzumaki grumbled rudely as she was roused from her heavenly slumber and brought back to the land of the living.

"Ugh!" she groaned aloud. It was the weekend and she didn't have work, which meant she'd like to take the opportunity to sleep in for once. "Naruto close those curtains up please? Its Sunday."

Sakura waited for a response but no verbal reply came, nor did she feel anyone's weight lift off of the bed. "Naruto? Didn't you hear me? I said—What the?!"

The pinkette cut herself off in shock because she was alone in bed. Her husband must have left their bed while she was still sleeping.

'Oh well, he probably just had to go to the bathroom.'

She sat in bed, dressed only in her silk sleeping clothes, as she waited for any telltale sounds from across the hallway, say from the shower running or a toilet flush. Five solid minutes passed and she heard nothing.

'Okaaaayyyy...Maybe he went downstairs to get some coffee ready?'

Figuring that she'd never get any answers sitting where she was, she threw the sheets to the side, put on her slippers and her robe, and headed out her bedroom and down two flights of stairs into the dining room that led into the kitchen. She could smell fresh coffee alright, but what she found when she looked through the open doorway was not just her husband hard at work preparing something but both of her children as well.

'What in the world? Why are the kids awake at this hour on a Sunday? Naruto you knucklehead, what are you up to?'

She decided to get their attention by knocking on the wall. This action caught the three of them by surprise and in Naruto's case it almost made him jump out of his skin.

"Aaahh!" he shouted. "Sakura! Honey, what are you doing up?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing. What's going on in here?"

"Well...umm...we umm...That is we, umm..."

A very young boy with blonde hair and green eyes, around nine years old, rolled his eyes before smiling at his mother. "I think what dad is trying to say is: 'Happy Mother's Day mom.'"

Sakura's eye's widened as she was unable to blink for a couple of seconds. ''M-Mother's...? No way. Is that _today?_ How could I have forgotten something like that?!'

"Mommy!"

The woman was cut off from her own thoughts for the second time this morning, this time by the sound of a little girl's excited voice. The girl, around four year's old and with hair as pink as her own and eyes as blue as her father's, ran up to her and hugged her leg. Sakura was quick to recover as she kneeled down and gave her bundle of joy a warm hug.

"Morning sweetheart," Sakura said as she planted a kiss on the little girl's forehead. "Are you helping daddy in the kitchen this morning?"

"Yeah!" Hanami squealed adorably.

Sakura smiled and waved to her son. "Morning Shina!"

The boy smiled and gave his mother a hug. "Morning mom."

Now that she'd greeted her children, she now directed her attention to her husband. "So what are you doing so early in the morning? And why did you get the kids involved when they could be sleeping in?"

"Well," Naruto scratched the back of his head sheepishly, "...We thought since it was Mother's Day that we'd let _you_ sleep in today while we surprised you with breakfast in bed."

Ouch! Now Sakura regretted being so curious. Not only had she spoiled her own surprise but she had interrogated her family just for trying to do something nice for her on her special day. "Gomen Naruto! Kids. I'm so sorry, I didn't know what was—"

"Its okay Sakura. We probably should have told you." Naruto was regretful at first, but then he got one of his huge signature grins. "Honey, you go get back in bed and rest up. We'll bring you your breakfast in a few minutes."

"Oh come on Naruto! I'm already up for goodness sake!" She would have protested further had he not pulled out the sad puppy dog eyes. She sighed. "Oh alright. I'll be upstairs."

The woman turned around and started walking back towards the stares as the man turned to his children. "Okay kids, we've got to work fast so we don't keep your mother waiting. Remember its Mother's Day, that means that whatever mommy wants, mommy gets. She does so much for all of us so today is all about us working to make her feel special. Understand?" Both kids nodded their heads. "Good. Now then, Shina, you get a bowl ready and start cracking some eggs. Hanami, be a dear and get me the butter out of the fridge while I turn on the stove."

* * *

Sakura was back in bed again waiting for her breakfast. She knew that she may have been a bit rude to Naruto a moment ago, old habits she supposed. It was a miracle that he had the patience to put up with her sometimes to be honest; she knew a lot of other men wouldn't.

'I'm too hard on him. He was just wanted to do something nice for me, but _noooo_ , I had to wake up in a grumpy mood and call him a doofus on Mother's Day. Well no more of that; its my day and I'm going to enjoy it, appreciate it, and share it with my family!'

She decided to pass her time by picking up a book that was resting on the night stand. It was her personal copy of _The Tale of Naruto_ , her husband's best selling novel that read more like an epic odyssey than as an autobiography. Heck, he needed to add a couple dozen pages of appendices to the back of it just to give out all the details and back story he had no room for in the story itself. Virtually everyone she knew (and nearly everyone in the entire village) had bought copy of it when the book came out, which is funny since Naruto seriously had doubts about whether it would sell well at all or get any positive reviews from critics.

There was even this one guy who contacted Naruto one time about adapting the book into a manga series, maybe even an anime that would air on television later on. His names was Masashi...something or other; Sakura was having trouble remembering his name since it was several years ago now. She did remember that he was a nice guy and a good artist with a good sense of humor, but he and Naruto disagreed on a few things and the deal never went through.

Anyway, she was going through the book last night just to amuse herself before she went to bed (obviously she had read the whole thing all the way through several times by now), and now, since it was Mother's Day, she had decided to jump ahead to one particular chapter.

It was a story about one of her husband's adventures when they were still teenagers. It happened not long after Pain's destruction of the village but soon before the war broke out. It was about that time when Naruto visited Genbu, the Island Turtle, and trained under Killer B to fully control Kurama (or the Nine-Tails as all of us only knew him back then), just as B had learned to control Gyūki years before. Sakura was still busy in the village at the time so she did not know about any of this back then.

The book revealed that Naruto had passed under some sort of 'enchanted waterfall' and had to confront Yami, his own dark side, before he could gain control over Kurama. He succeeded, and from there he entered his own mindscape and did battle with the tailed beast. His power, words and influence were strong, dangerous, manipulative, and it might have been too much even for someone with a will as strong as his...had it not been for the intervention of the person Sakura wanted to read about.

This day marked the first and only time that Naruto got to meet Kushina, his mother. Sakura never had the opportunity to meet her herself, but from everything her husband wrote she sounded like quite a remarkable woman. She was a young, beautiful, tomboyish woman that hated loosing, and she also had a savage temper and a short fuse...kind of like Sakura herself actually. Her temper and brutality even earned her a nickname, "The Red-Hot Blooded Habanero." The book told the story about what she had told Naruto about her past, that she was a member of the former Uzumaki clan that had immigrated to Konoha when she was a girl for the purpose of becoming the second jinchūriki to the Nine-Tails. She was bullied all the time at the Academy for her long red hair which, combined with her puffy cheeks, made her look like a human tomato. Sakura could relate to that first hand, having to grow up with girls constantly bullying her for her large forehead.

The book told about one night when shinobi from the Hidden Cloud Village abducted her in order to gain control of the Nine-Tails. She was smart enough to pluck out strands of her own hair to leave a trail for someone to find her, but she doubted anyone would care since she was an outsider. As it turned out, there was only one person who ever noticed the trail and came to her rescue, and it was the last person she ever would have expected. It was one of her classmates, an unassuming boy with bright blonde hair that she judged to be a wimp. His name was Minato Namikaze, and this so-called wimp of a Genin took out all of her fully grown Jōnin captives all by himself. He'd told her that he didn't want to loose her, that he loved her red hair, the aspect of herself that she herself despised. And yet here was this boy, this unassuming boy that had totally caught her off guard with his hidden strength and power that fully accepted her for who she was and cared about her when most others didn't, even loving something about her that she did not herself.

It was almost spooky to Sakura how familiar this all seemed...

From that day on Kushina loved her hair. She called it her red thread of fate that had brought her and Minato together. Yes, she fell in love that day. She fell in love very young, and he fully returned her feelings...This was one place where Sakura knew her own story differed from Kushina's. Sure she fell in love at a young age too, but it was for entirely the wrong boy, and unlike Kushina, it had happened really for no good reason. While Naruto's mother had this wonderfully romantic story about being rescued by a man who would become her true love and who helped her to appreciate and accept herself for who she was, Sakura had developed a crush on the same boy that nearly every other girl her age had also done and her growing love for him was out of concern and pity if anything else.

No, the boy who really deserved her heart was waiting right there in the wings, desperate to get her to respect him, and for too long she refused to do so. He was a brat, an idiot, a nuisance to her. He was nothing, just like all of her friends and all the adults always said he was. He was a loser, a prankster, a clown, a lonely outcast freak with no parents, no clan, no talent, no brains and no future. All this blonde haired boy with strange fox-like whisker marks on his face had to his name was a dream, a stupid, impossible dream that he preached about day and night. It was a dream to rise from being despised and having nothing to becoming respected and having everything. He wanted to become the next Hokage, the leader of the very village that hated him. Nobody, Sakura included, believed that he could do this. Nobody thought he had a future that would ever amount to anything.

'Oh God, were all of us so completely wrong about that!'

As they grew up, as the three of them all trained and studied and bonded together, she slowly was allowed to see the true Naruto Uzumaki. The one who never abandoned his friends, the one who never gave up on anything he believed in, the one who could defy any odds and achieve things no one expected of him. That boy who may not have had the sharpest brain on the planet, but whose heart was several times larger than nearly anyone else she knew.

When Sasuke left, Naruto was still there. Okay, sure, he went away for over two years to train with Jiraiya, but he came home when Sasuke wouldn't. The two of them got close. The bonded, they became true friends...And by the end of the war her feelings were _very_ confused. It took a lot of soul searching, but she eventually realized that he had won her heart and they fell in love.

Anyway, the book went on to describe how Kushina's spirit used her unique chakra to help her son fully gain control over the Nine-Tails chakra. But before she disappeared from him mindscape forever, she used the little time she had left to share one last story with him...the story of the night he was born...and the night he and Minato both died.

It was all the fault of Obito (or of Madara, depending of your point-of-view), but Kushina had given birth to a healthy baby boy, one that was born with strange markings on his cheeks because the Nine-Tails's chakra was redirected to help developed the growing fetus during her pregnancy. Because of this, the seal keeping the fox inside her was weakening, and when she finally had her child, as joyous as the moment was, it meant that this was the best opportunity the beast had of escaping its prison. The masked man knew this. He killed the Third's wife to get to the Fourth and his family. He snatched the newborn up and threatened his life unless they met his demands. In the end, the Foruth Hokage saved his son, but his wife was taken prisoner and the Nine-Tails was released to go on his legendary rampage across the village, killing hundreds.

The whole thing was futile; the masked man got away and was never seen again for years, but the beast still needed to be contained, and Kushina was slowly dying from loosing it. There was no other choice, no one else who was available, no one else the Fourth could trust with such a burden. Poor baby Naruto **had** to become the Nine-Tails' next jinchūriki. But then the gigantic beast nearly thrust its sharp claws straight into the child's heart...had both of his parents not instinctively took the fatal blow for their son. It was horrific, it was tragic, but it allowed their son to live, and that was what mattered.

As the Eight Trigrams sealing ritual was being completed and the Dead Demon Consuming Seal enacted, the dying mother bestowed her final words of wisdom to her son, words which she read on the pages of the book:

 _"Naruto...don't be a fussy eater...Eat a lot and grow up to be a big boy! Take your bath every day...Go to bed early and sleep well! Make friends...it doesn't matter how many...Just make sure they're real friends...people you can trust...even a few is enough! And study your ninjutsu...I was never very good at it, maybe you will be...Everyone had things they're good at and things they're not...Don't feel bad if you can't do it all. Make sure you listen to the teachers...at the Academy. Save what you earn from missions...No drinking alcohol until your 20, and don't overdo it or you'll ruin your body. And as for women...Well, I'm a woman so I don't know what to say, but there are only men and women in this world, and you'll want a girlfriend someday...Just try not to pick a weird one...Try to find someone like your mother...And the fourth warning...Watch out for Jiraiya-sensei!_

 _...Naruto...You're going to experience a lot of pain and suffering...Remember who you are! Find a goal...A dream...And don't stop until it comes true!_

 _...There's...There's...! There's...There's so much more I want to say...to teach you about...I want to stay with you...I love you..."_

Sakura was chocking up. She always did whenever she read this. It was the saddest, yet also most beautiful scene of the book and it touched her soul. She never knew Kushina in life, but she had nothing but admiration for her.

'Kushina, if you could have lived to see the wonderful man your son had become...'

 _Knock! Knock!_

Hearing the knock on the door, Sakura quickly set the book back down on the night stand and dried her eyes. "Come in."

One of the bedroom doors opened and in stepped her husband with a tray of freshly made food...And no, none of it was ramen, thank goodness! He was followed by both of their kids, the boy carrying a glass of juice in one hand and fresh cup of coffee in the other hand that were clearly meant to go with her meal.

"Hey," Naruto said as he approached the bed. "Sorry if we kept you waiting too long."

"No, no, its alright," she said, her voice still a bit emotional from the story she'd just read.

"Are you alright mommy?" Hanami asked with concern as she sat on the bed with her mother.

Sakura quickly put on a bright smile as she hugged her daughter for the second time today. "Mommy's fine sweetheart, don't worry about me."

"Then why are your eyes red mom?" Shinachiku questioned observantly. The boy always did have his mother's sharp mind.

Sakura, never the best as disguising her emotions, clearly appeared embarrassed. Fortunately, Naruto was able to catch onto this and decided to spare his wife any more discomfort.

"Shina," he said, "your mom said she's fine. Lets not trouble her too much, it is Mother's Day after all."

The boy took the hint, "Okay dad."

"Anyway," he said as he turned his attention back to his wife, "I hope you like it."

Naruto sat the tray on Sakura's lap for her eyes to take in her morning meal. She had to admit that she was impressed. An omelet topped with ketchup, two strips each of bacon and sausage, freshly sliced apples, a couple of fresh strawberries, a waffle covered in syrup and butter, and a slice of buttered toast. Shinachiku sat the juice and the coffee on the night stand within her reach.

"You made all of this just for me?"

"I helped!" Hanami said excitedly.

"Me too," Shinachiku added.

"I hope it looks good," Naruto said with a misplaced sense of nervousness.

" _Good?_ Honey this looks _delicious!_ I can't believe the three of you put together a meal like this so fast!"

"Fast?" Shinachiku asked confused . "Mom, we were in the kitchen for over half an hour."

Sakura was taken aback and blushed slightly. Apparently she had lost track of time and had been reading that book for even longer than she'd thought. "Oh, umm...Yes, very good then!"

Picking up the knife and fork that was sitting on the tray next to the plate, she first cut into the omelet and brought the first bite into the mouth.

"Whoa!" she exclaimed. "This is delicious! Naruto, what did you put into this omelet?"

"Well I rummaged through the pantry and put some things together." He started counting the ingredients on his fingers. "Eggs...freshly shredded cheese...bell peppers...spinach...wasabi..."

 _"WASABI?!"_

The knuckle-headed Hokage started cracking up. "Got ya!"

"That's **not** funny! You know how much I hate spicy foods!"

"Which is exactly _why_ its so funny! Besides, it's your own fault for falling for it. Do you feel like your tongue's on fire right now?"

"...No..."

"Then there's nothing spicy in the omelet."

Sakura folded her arms in a huff, embarrassed that she'd let him get the upper hand on her, on Mother's Day no less! Still, she supposed she ought to be grateful; she'd known him long enough to know how dangerous he could be on April Fool's Day...

"Well thank you all for breakfast you guys," Sakura said in a polite and thankful mood again. "And thank you two for all you're help."

"You're welcome mommy."

"Yeah, Happy Mother's Day mom."

"Thank you Shina."

"Come on kids, lets leave your mother alone so she can eat in peace. Besides we still need to make sure your bellies are full for the day too. And both of you be careful going down the stairs."

Both of the kids left the bedroom, Sakura kissing her daughter on the cheek before she went. Naruto stayed behind as his wife started cutting into her waffle.

"So I did good?"

"All three of you did, thank you."

"You're welcome." He then sat down on the bed and look her in the eye. "What's the matter?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that when we came in it looked like your eyes were red like your were crying or something."

Sakura set her utensils down and sighed softly. She reached over the to night stand again and handed him the book.

"You were reading this again?"

"Just a little bit. I umm...I was reading about your mom."

An awkward tension crept into the blonde's mind once she'd said that. "Oh, I see..."

Sakura placed her hand on his. "Hey, she was an amazing woman, and I have no doubt she'd be proud of what you'd become."

He smiled softly. "Thanks. I know she'd love to have met you too."

"Technically she did."

"Huh?!"

"Remember I told you what my mom once told me? That your mom and mine were childhood friends along with Sasuke's mom and that Kushina met me when I was just a baby?"

"Oh yeah! I do remember that...Man! What are the odds of _that_ happening?!"

They two of them laughed to themselves before Sakura broke another moment of silence. "I wish I could have met her for real though."

Naruto nodded. "I wish she could have met the kids. Her and dad."

Another moment passed before Naruto sighed and put on one of his signature big, infectious smiles. "Oh well, I'm just glad you're okay. Happy Mother's Day Sakura."

"Domo arigato Naruto."

He leaned in to share a short but romantic kiss with his wife, which she accepted without hesitation. When they broke the kiss, Naruto got up off the bed and started heading toward the door. "I'd better go make sure the kids are alright. Are you going to be okay on your own?"

"Yeah I'll be fine. I'm just going to sit here and finish this delicious meal and then I'll go take a shower."

"And then what?"

"What do you mean?"

"It _is_ Mother's Day y'know. You can do whatever you want today. We can go catch a movie, or follow you as you go shopping, go take a walk in the forest, whatever you want to do."

Sakura thought about it for a moment. She thought back to Kushina's story, how tragic it was, how she never had her chance to be with her children. Well, Sakura was not going to let her happiness pass her by.

"Actually Naruto, what would really make me happy is the chance to just stay home and spend time with my family."

* * *

So, what do you think? Like I said its just a simple day-in-the-life episode of Sakura on Mother's Day morning. I admit that I didn't really know where I was going with this until I hit on the idea of going back to Naruto's book and the story of what happened to Kushina. Once I hit on that, the rest of the story fit together pretty naturally.

For the record, the dialogue I'm quoting of Kushina's last words to Naruto before she died was taken from the mangafreak translation. I did not have the official published translation by Viz Media on hand unfortunately. Still, I think it comes close enough and I may go back in and correct it later, so I do apologize in case there are any mistranslations.

I have alluded to Sakura's respect and admiration of Kushina in the past, ever since the second chapter of "Shinachiku's First Adventure." And also, the idea of Kushina and Mebuki (and Mikoto) being childhood friends was from the fourth chapter of "Heaven and Earth Together At Last," which was itself adapted from an unfinished doujinshi by Lady GT. As I've said before, she is an amazing artist and if you'd never seen her work before than I'm not kidding when I tell you that it looks so spot on to Kishimoto's own style that if you didn't know any better you might easily mistake it for the real thing.

I don't have much more to say besides that. I hope you enjoyed this little story, and once again Happy Mother's Day!

Until next time, see ya!


End file.
